Make Money Online with Brandon Hopkins

Ok, Justin Timberlake may be bringing sexy back, but I’m bringing meta tags back. Before you start leaving comments about how irrelevant meta tags are, just know that I do agree. I don’t know if all search engines agree though.

Wordpress may indeed be the absolute best blogging platform and CMS available, but theme designers often miss crucial elements that allow your Wordpress blog to be fully SEO’d.

In order to add effective meta tags to your Wordpress blog, open up your header.php (or whatever the header file is called) for the theme you’re currently using. You can open it up from the Wordpress admin panel, or download it via FTP and edit it that way.

The header is where the following code will go.

So with that in mind, here is the way I’ve constructed my meta tags for this blog:

Don’t forget to put < and > on the ends of the meta tags before inserting them into the header file.

meta name="description" content="Make Money Online with Brandon Hopkins" /
The description is arguably the only important meta tag still being used by many search engines.

meta http-equiv="author" content="Brandon Hopkins" /
Do search engines care who the author is?

meta http-equiv="contact" content="brandonchopkins@gmail.com" /
I’m sure this is just spam food, but Gmail takes care of spam for me.

meta name="keywords" content="make, money, online, brandon hopkins" /
Some keywords for search engines to know what your site is about.

Here is my secret advice. It will work for your description and possibly your keywords, depending on how you structure your titles.
meta name="description" content="< ?php the_title(); ?>" /

This will take the description and add whatever the title of your post is. Just take a look at the page source for this post (Apple+U for FF Mac users).

See how the meta description of this post matches the post title…awesome. More descriptive words, but more importantly, we’re reducing the amount of duplicate content that every blog has. You now have unique meta description tags for every page on your site!

Let me know if you have any meta tag secrets!

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Just a little FYI…

Looking for a free link on a business website, here is your chance. No recip necessary.

If you have a business card question, contact me and if I post your question I’ll also post a link to your website!

Simple as that. I have received questions about business card design, marketing, what to put on business cards, how to make business cards unique, and many more.

Contact form is on that same page.

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Deat Matt Cutts and Google,

I used to love you. I would tell my friends about the “car Google bought”, the mortgage “Adsense was paying for”, and so on. Now you are trying to destroy what you helped create.

In an outright foolish blog post Matt Cutts said, “I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms.”

In other words, “We need data in order to be able to stop people buying links from anyone but us. Please screw other webmasters by being an un-paid rat, we’d appreciate it.”

Google, if you want my advice, stop fighting against webmasters, because if it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t have anything to offer searchers.

Webmasters don’t put content on the internet anymore because they want to. They write and spend money building sites so they can make money.

We don’t need a puppet giving us little tid bits of not actually useful help in “ranking better“.

But now you want us to stop making money by selling text links for page rank? Matt Cutts said, “Ash, there’s absolutely no problem with selling links for traffic (as opposed to PageRank).” How can I, as a webmaster, know what the intention of other webmasters is going to be? How can you, as a search engine, punish me for selling related text links? After all, I must approve links that are put on my pages. So even if they are paid, they are deemed relevant by me. It’s my site, and my content, leave it alone.

Oh, and on another note Cutts also said, “For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt.” Why should I punish people who are buying relevant links on my site by nofollowing them?  After all, didn’t you just say there is “absolutely no problem” with selling links for traffic?

They want a link, I think their site is worthy, they offer to give me money, it’s a win-win-win. It’s a win for me, I get paid. It’s a win for them, they get a relevant link. It’s a win for you, you find another relelvant site.

However, punishing paid links is a lose-lose-draw. I lose because people are scared to buy links. Advertisers lose because I won’t go to the trouble of giving them a link without getting paid. You won’t find the relevant site as easy, even though you’ll find it eventually.

I know with as many minor SERP updates, you can easily filter out 99% of spam. You aren’t going to catch that other 1% of spammers this way.

If you are going to alienate me and tell me that what I’m doing, and will continue to do, is against your rules, does that make me a “black hat”? And since you are saying that I’m on the wrong side of the line, what stops me from going all the way over and joining SEOBlackHat (No nofollow)?

If you still think this “Calling All Snitches” post is a good idea, keep it up.  You’ve just lost a follower and forced someone to the dark side.

Never again yours,

Brandon Hopkins

8 comments